TRANSFORMING IDEAS INTO REALITY

Symphony Group – Improving customer service

Improving Customer Service and Satisfaction

Working with DeeperThanBlue, Symphony Group designed and implemented a mobile solution that improved customer service, cash to order and reduced shrinkage with site deliveries.

The Symphony Group Story

Symphony is the UK’s largest privately owned manufacturer of fitted kitchen, fitted bedroom and fitted bathroom furniture with a turnover exceeding £220 million and over 1500 employees. Their customers include housing developers, social housing providers, independent retailers and merchants.

Symphony offers this broad range of customers an unrivalled portfolio of brands including the Laura Ashley Kitchen Collection, Gallery, Linear, Aquadi and Urbano offering complete portfolios of furniture and accessories for every project. Symphony pride themselves on a diverse product range, their cutting edge manufacturing capabilities and outstanding service providing their customers with everything they need to succeed.

What was the objective?

The mobile solution needed to record picks and packing notes in the warehouse through to the manifest on the delivery truck as well as update the core Symphony business systems.

The next stage in the process was to record delivery of goods on a housing development site or at a customers’ premises. Customers would then be asked to sign a Proof of Delivery (PoD) which would then be transmitted over messaging back to the core business applications.

What was the challenge?

Symphony manufacture high value products that are delivered to construction sites as well as retail customers. As a business they were suffering from an inaccurate recording of picks in the warehouse as well as recording a customer delivery. This led to customer issues where goods were not being receipted and ultimately had an impact on debtor days, cashflow as well as shrinkage of products.

What was the outcome?

The mobile application was developed and implemented on rugged devices so that they would stand the wear and tear in the warehouse and out on the road. Built using IBM MQ, MQTT and WebSphere Application server middleware the solution provides the ability to scan and transact consignments to item level and have visibility from production line through to customer delivery as well as update the Oracle back-office application. The solution has improved invoice accuracy, reduced shrinkage, improved the order to cash process, and improved traceability as well inventory accuracy.

The solution has improved invoice accuracy, reduced shrinkage, improved the order to cash process, and improved traceability as well as inventory accuracy.